Most settings work for handbrake, just remember to turn the audio down to 44 or it will be off.

The encoding I created above is AAC audio, 128 Kbps bitrate 48 kHz sample rate which is the standard for AAC audio these days (the sampling rate). It's not necessary to alter that as several people just reported the file is playing just fine. Here's a property snapshot of the video file:

Now for more test clips: an 800x336 encode (like I said, that's fairly standard resolution for Android devices), another maxed out at 848 pixels wide so that should be the max that the Nook Color can handle, and a final encode at 1024 just 'cause I want to know what'll happen if you attempt to play it. The last one most likely will not play on the Nook Color based on the stated specs, but try it and let me know what happens, please.

These clips are the same source material, the only difference in the settings between that 720x304 clip earlier is the resolution itself.

As for the Nightly Builds, there's two components: the actual command line (CLI) app, and the GUI app. If you choose the GUI version, it will install a CLI as well but usually the CLI is a few builds behind from the separate CLI build. I usually update once a week even in spite of the builds coming somewhat more frequently, but how you handle it is up to you (if you choose to use those builds).

Install the GUI, then get the CLI .zip file, extract the contents, then just copy those contents into the main HandBrake folder and overwrite the older version(s) and you'll have the latest you grabbed.

If this works out, I planned to do a somewhat detailed thread on encoding videos for the Nook Color using HandBrake, maybe if people find it useful it can become a resource for those wishing to get more video content onto their devices. The 800x336 one might be the best choice overall since you should easily be able to move it between any devices you have, smartphones, iPod touchs, iPhones, Android tablets, etc - it should play on all of them without issues.

The idea here is to find "the sweet spot" for the best file size to quality tradeoff and also consider that you might only want to do one single encode that you can drop on any of your hardware and have it play back without issue instead of encoding per device which is time consuming and frustrating too.

We'll see what happens. Just for the record, here are the average bitrates of each of these clips, also:

One last consideration: there is also the possibility that if the Nook Color does get a fairly easy-to-do root (it's already rooted but it can be a daunting thing for some folks) OR if Barnes & Noble does create an actual marketplace and someone puts up an even better media player, more options could be added later on.

The reason I mention this is because my Wife really wants a Nook Color (so do I to some degree) but she's deaf, so unless I can find a way to get the captions/subtitles to play on the Nook Color then it's just not worth it. The Archos 70 is barely $30 more in cost but the media player on that device can handle the subs exactly as I require/need them to work as I'll explain in a moment, and of course it offers more overall than the Nook Color but with a lower quality lower resolution screen, unfortunately.

I'm going to assume the stock media player on the Nook Color just doesn't offer that functionality but there are other media players on the Android Marketplace that do have that capability, so that's my hope: that if I get one I'll be able to get some videos on there and she can watch them with captions/subs.

And yes, I know that I can burn in the captions/subtitles permanently but, I'm not deaf, and I prefer to disable them as required which is called soft-subs in video encoding terms. The media player reads the subtitle track data stream as basically text and it's just an option to turn on or off.

Anyway, enjoy the videos and let me know what the max seems to be and then I'll work on a guide later. Note: the videos above used an actual HD resolution clip (720p at 1280x544 resolution) as the source material - if you intend to do these kinds of encodings using DVDs that you own, the max resolution you'll get is 720 pixels wide and the height in pixels will vary depending on the aspect ratio of the source material. DVD resolution is 720x480 but with widescreen content that means the infamous "black bars" to fill out the image.

That's the reason I did the 720x304 clip - if you owned Tron: Legacy on DVD (kinda early since it ain't out yet) and you used that as the source, that's what you'd get for the max, 720x304 given the aspect ratio.

HandBrake encodes the raw native resolution of the actual clip meaning it leaves out the black bars so no space is wasted by a bunch of zero bits that aren't necessary in the final encode.